A few times throughout our service, someone from the Peace Corps office in Ouaga comes to visit our humble sites. Last week, one of the staff came to visit my site. He inspected my house, finding lots of mouse holes and places where scorpions apparently like hiding (I have only seen one scorpion in my time here but he said they were the perfect scorpion hiding places). I didn’t have a gate; there is no shade-providing hangar in my yard.
Then we went to the CSPS where we had a meeting with my two counterparts. I expected it to be more of a formality than anything because here, people always like to be “informed” of things and greeted especially when someone comes from out of town. I also expected them to be given a little grief into helping me bully the carpenter into getting my gate and hangar made (did I mention I ordered them over 6 months ago, stop by at least once a week to ask about their progress, and they STILL hadn’t been made?). However, it turned into an awkward situation where my counterparts were yelled at for not working enough with me. Being an American, I do NOT like yelling but here yelling is how you get things done. While the yelling was uncomfortable, ultimately I think it was a good thing. Misunderstandings between my counterparts and I were brought to light and now I can work to fix them.
Another thing I realized after this visit was that I had been feeling a little defeated by Burkina and development work in general. I didn’t know I was feeling this way until suddenly, with some misunderstandings cleared and a spark in the form of chastisement was lit under my counterparts, I didn’t feel that way anymore. Suddenly, I’m feeling very enthusiastic and optimistic about my last 10 months here and the work I hope to accomplish.
And I’ll try to keep you posted on these endeavors as they happen
Peace out!
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
So how does one spend their time in the BF?
It has recently been brought to my attention that after over a year here, I haven’t done a very good job of shedding light on my day to day life. So I will begin my post by trying to better illuminate village life.
By the time I wake up around 7 AM (a little later the few weeks a year it’s below 80˚) everyone in village is awake. The women are busy, finding wood to cook with or pounding something (rice, millet, corn, etc) and sweeping their courtyard. I drink some instant coffee while eating oatmeal or the previous night’s leftovers if it’s not hot season. After a couple of hours to myself, I head out to the CSPS. While I’m there, I generally hang out in the pharmacy or the maternity. I help with little things as needed until lunch time. While I’m doing this, village women are still pounding things and preparing lunch/dinner (usually one meal is prepared a day and the family just eats throughout the evening until it’s gone). If it’s rainy season, people are in the fields planting and weeding and whatever else goes into growing crops.
At lunch time I bike back home, stopping at my village’s mini-marché on the way. At its best, there are tomatoes, onions, cabbage, garlic, aubergines, hot peppers, yams, and very occasionally, green peppers and lettuce. At its worst, it has onions, some very sketchy looking tomatoes, and dried hot peppers.
I buy whatever veggies I need and continue home to cook them with rice or pasta. After lunch, it’s the beautiful time called repose. Sometimes I nap, sometimes I read, but it’s almost always a time to not move during the hottest part of the day. The rest of the village tends to be lounging around under trees.
When the sun starts to lose the worst of its intensity, I visit neighbors or hang out with people who have come to visit me (mostly this consists of children, though lately I’ve had a few more adult visitors than usual!). Visiting someone usually means being offered a stool to sit on and a bowl of tô to eat. The women almost always keep doing whatever they were doing when you I arrived and very little talking takes place (unless there’s a group of women and then they talk too much and too fast for me to understand anything).
Once the sun goes down, I take a bucket bath and settle in to read or write letters by candle light. Sometimes a couple of my neighbors come over and they use my battery-powered light to do their homework. The past couple weeks they’ve brought over some leaves that we boil in water until the water turns red. We take out the leaves, add sugar, and enjoy (Okay, I’ll be honest – I’m mostly enjoying the company and drinking the beverage to be polite). Then eventually it’s time to go to sleep, and my exciting day is done!
A few notes on life in general:
Amenities – There is no electricity in my village. For water, there are wells and a few community faucets of water where people get water by the giant bowl full (or, for those of us who can’t carry 25 L on our heads, by the 30 L yellow gasoline jug strapped to the back of my bike!)
Language – Some people speak “village” French and essentially everyone speaks Jula and Gouin. I can get around in Jula and greet people in Gouin, but I rely heavily on gestures especially when talking with women. Days can pass when the only person I speak English to is myself.
Getting Around – I ride my bike everywhere, and there are many families that have bikes. Some people have motorcycles/mopeds and there are two cars in my village. Getting around village, most people walk.
By the time I wake up around 7 AM (a little later the few weeks a year it’s below 80˚) everyone in village is awake. The women are busy, finding wood to cook with or pounding something (rice, millet, corn, etc) and sweeping their courtyard. I drink some instant coffee while eating oatmeal or the previous night’s leftovers if it’s not hot season. After a couple of hours to myself, I head out to the CSPS. While I’m there, I generally hang out in the pharmacy or the maternity. I help with little things as needed until lunch time. While I’m doing this, village women are still pounding things and preparing lunch/dinner (usually one meal is prepared a day and the family just eats throughout the evening until it’s gone). If it’s rainy season, people are in the fields planting and weeding and whatever else goes into growing crops.
At lunch time I bike back home, stopping at my village’s mini-marché on the way. At its best, there are tomatoes, onions, cabbage, garlic, aubergines, hot peppers, yams, and very occasionally, green peppers and lettuce. At its worst, it has onions, some very sketchy looking tomatoes, and dried hot peppers.
I buy whatever veggies I need and continue home to cook them with rice or pasta. After lunch, it’s the beautiful time called repose. Sometimes I nap, sometimes I read, but it’s almost always a time to not move during the hottest part of the day. The rest of the village tends to be lounging around under trees.
When the sun starts to lose the worst of its intensity, I visit neighbors or hang out with people who have come to visit me (mostly this consists of children, though lately I’ve had a few more adult visitors than usual!). Visiting someone usually means being offered a stool to sit on and a bowl of tô to eat. The women almost always keep doing whatever they were doing when you I arrived and very little talking takes place (unless there’s a group of women and then they talk too much and too fast for me to understand anything).
Once the sun goes down, I take a bucket bath and settle in to read or write letters by candle light. Sometimes a couple of my neighbors come over and they use my battery-powered light to do their homework. The past couple weeks they’ve brought over some leaves that we boil in water until the water turns red. We take out the leaves, add sugar, and enjoy (Okay, I’ll be honest – I’m mostly enjoying the company and drinking the beverage to be polite). Then eventually it’s time to go to sleep, and my exciting day is done!
A few notes on life in general:
Amenities – There is no electricity in my village. For water, there are wells and a few community faucets of water where people get water by the giant bowl full (or, for those of us who can’t carry 25 L on our heads, by the 30 L yellow gasoline jug strapped to the back of my bike!)
Language – Some people speak “village” French and essentially everyone speaks Jula and Gouin. I can get around in Jula and greet people in Gouin, but I rely heavily on gestures especially when talking with women. Days can pass when the only person I speak English to is myself.
Getting Around – I ride my bike everywhere, and there are many families that have bikes. Some people have motorcycles/mopeds and there are two cars in my village. Getting around village, most people walk.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Happy Mid-Service!
It’s crazy to think that I’ve been here over a year! But there have been a few instances recently when it has been very obvious that not only is my life incredibly different over here but that I am so used to it I don’t always notice when things are “amiss” by American standards. This change stood out exceptionally when I spent a day with my fellow PCV and her parents who were visiting from the States. Things that we thought were nice or even luxurious – a private car that didn’t break down where you weren’t sitting on top of someone or getting tetanus from the rusty spring poking your butt or a hotel that had a real toilet and air conditioning – they found to be severely subpar. Another thing they kept saying was how difficult, sad, and downright miserable life is here, not just for PCV’s but especially for Burkinabe. With one week in country, I can see that mindset. However, I can safely say that my life is not miserable (no matter how much PCV’s like to complain amongst ourselves). Sure some days I am hot and trying without success to make something work but most days are fine.
I have also noticed that my good days here are almost impossible to convey to people back home. So I’ll try but I don’t know how this will come across. If my bike hasn’t broken and given me problems and a mouse hasn’t tortured me all night with his presence in my house and the kids listen to me and realize I’ll be nicer to them when they don’t harass me and I’m not compared to another volunteer (too much) and I am amused by my neighbor’s curiosity (read: nosiness) instead of irritated by it and I say the right ridiculous things to get people to laugh and have a conversation…these things make a good day. It’s so many little things not going wrong that leave me with a feeling that I live here and the next year will be fine and not overwhelming and I’ll actually like it. See? That hardly sounds like a good day when put into words, even to me! But I feel great about myself and life at the end of them.
So let’s see, life in village. My closest PCV neighbor and I threw a Halloween party. It was going to be really fun (candy, cookies, mask decorating, dancing, bobbing for aubergines…) but massive amounts of kids came who I had never met and it got kind of crazy and we had to end the party after only a few activities.
I found some wonderful books that are in Jula (one of my local languages) and are photos of people in West Africa doing daily things – market day, making certain foods, making dolo (locally made millet beer). They are great! I read them to the kids and they love them. At the end of the book about making dolo, it says “But attention! Dolo is not for children!” Yes, this seems obvious to not give children alcohol but here it is not so obvious and can lead to some crazy things. Which segues nicely into my next anecdote…
My neighbors are a great family, with polite, healthy kids and a clean courtyard . Often, the ten or thirteen year old will watch their baby sister, Pascaline, who is 2. One day, the three of them came over after school. Pascaline likes me and was happy to see me, but she was acting crazy. She ran around in circles then fall over, then giggle and get back up and run around until she fell over or ran into me. “Pascaline!” I exclaimed, “What is wrong with you?!”
“Oh,” replied her sister, “Can’t you smell it? She drank too much dolo!”
“What? Who the heck would give her dolo?” I demanded.
“Well, we were in school, our parents were in the fields, so we left her with the old people.”
(I should also note that most old people in my village spend all day long drinking dolo)
While I certainly do NOT approve of this, what could I do but laugh at the adorable baby stumbling around? Of course I said that dolo is bad for children.
“We know!” they said. “Attention!” they used their quoting voices, “Dolo is not for children!”
The next few days, I would hear kids randomly saying “Attention! Dolo is not for children!”
I will end this by stating how funny sounding the words ‘forty-four’ and ‘bottle’ are. I never noticed until I said them around a Burkinabe who cracked up, making me laugh, until we ended up on the floor laughing at how weird these words sounded as we repeated them over and over. Seriously. Just say them.
Peace out!
I have also noticed that my good days here are almost impossible to convey to people back home. So I’ll try but I don’t know how this will come across. If my bike hasn’t broken and given me problems and a mouse hasn’t tortured me all night with his presence in my house and the kids listen to me and realize I’ll be nicer to them when they don’t harass me and I’m not compared to another volunteer (too much) and I am amused by my neighbor’s curiosity (read: nosiness) instead of irritated by it and I say the right ridiculous things to get people to laugh and have a conversation…these things make a good day. It’s so many little things not going wrong that leave me with a feeling that I live here and the next year will be fine and not overwhelming and I’ll actually like it. See? That hardly sounds like a good day when put into words, even to me! But I feel great about myself and life at the end of them.
So let’s see, life in village. My closest PCV neighbor and I threw a Halloween party. It was going to be really fun (candy, cookies, mask decorating, dancing, bobbing for aubergines…) but massive amounts of kids came who I had never met and it got kind of crazy and we had to end the party after only a few activities.
I found some wonderful books that are in Jula (one of my local languages) and are photos of people in West Africa doing daily things – market day, making certain foods, making dolo (locally made millet beer). They are great! I read them to the kids and they love them. At the end of the book about making dolo, it says “But attention! Dolo is not for children!” Yes, this seems obvious to not give children alcohol but here it is not so obvious and can lead to some crazy things. Which segues nicely into my next anecdote…
My neighbors are a great family, with polite, healthy kids and a clean courtyard . Often, the ten or thirteen year old will watch their baby sister, Pascaline, who is 2. One day, the three of them came over after school. Pascaline likes me and was happy to see me, but she was acting crazy. She ran around in circles then fall over, then giggle and get back up and run around until she fell over or ran into me. “Pascaline!” I exclaimed, “What is wrong with you?!”
“Oh,” replied her sister, “Can’t you smell it? She drank too much dolo!”
“What? Who the heck would give her dolo?” I demanded.
“Well, we were in school, our parents were in the fields, so we left her with the old people.”
(I should also note that most old people in my village spend all day long drinking dolo)
While I certainly do NOT approve of this, what could I do but laugh at the adorable baby stumbling around? Of course I said that dolo is bad for children.
“We know!” they said. “Attention!” they used their quoting voices, “Dolo is not for children!”
The next few days, I would hear kids randomly saying “Attention! Dolo is not for children!”
I will end this by stating how funny sounding the words ‘forty-four’ and ‘bottle’ are. I never noticed until I said them around a Burkinabe who cracked up, making me laugh, until we ended up on the floor laughing at how weird these words sounded as we repeated them over and over. Seriously. Just say them.
Peace out!
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Ramblings of a Village Dweller
So if I were someone who followed this blog , I’d be annoyed at me for not posting in forever . So sorry, mom! Things here get more and more normal to me all the time so it is hard for me to remember things that are funny or interesting to non-PCVs. Things are going well in general; rainy season is great because it is no longer regularly over 100°F but that also means everyone is in the fields working and even the people who don't work in the fields (teachers, nurses, etc.) are convinced that doing any kind of project is impossible. That includes even thinking about maybe planning a project. As I enjoy planning, this is pretty irritating. But I just keep bothering people and hopefully in a month or two when it is no longer rainy season, people will be ready for all the things I'm bringing up.
Since there is no school kids are getting crazier and crazier. In fact, right at this very moment, a bunch of kids are just standing staring at me and my computer activities. Hooray. I will be very pleased next month when school starts.
I did do one little PC-esque thing. I made Neem Cream with my friend. Neem is one of many seemingly magical trees that Burkina has that has so many cool functions. The leaves of Neem trees can be used as a natural pesticide and when you boil them and add shea butter (shea trees are another super abundant tree here) and soap you get a natural, very inexpensive mosquito repellent! Which means reduced chances of getting malaria if you use it. So I helped my friend make it (read: gave her the recipe) and all of her neighbors love it. So now she is going to make more and try to sell it (income generating activity AND fighting malaria. BAM!)
Earlier this week was Ramadan. I celebrated the way people celebrate every holiday here: went to my friend's house and ate as much food as I could take. Which is not enough for them. They try to feed me SO MUCH and here is the thing I do not understand: why does village food taste like bitter dirt water? What is the secret ingredient that leads to it not just tasting blah but actively tasting bad??? I do not understand it. I just am thankful I can eat pretty much anything no matter the taste.
Speaking of which, last month was caterpillar month! Caterpillars were EVERYWHERE and guess what Burkinabe do with them. If you guessed eat them, you are correct. And since they are only prolific for one month all year they are quite a delicacy. So of course everyone wanted to give me some. Here's the thing, though. When they are fried well and you don't think about what you are eating, they are pretty good! I wouldn't eat them if people didn't give them to me and I certainly won't ask for them but if there is a bowl in front of me, I'll munch away and won't even be trying to calculate the minimun I have to eat so they will not force me to eat more.
And finally, a story about being villageoise (or I guess villagey in English) and also language mix ups. My friend's sister came to village to visit her one day. This sister lives in Ouaga and was very western by Burkina standards. She teaches English there so naturally everyone thought we should be friends. I felt silly in my fish pagne dress next to this lady in her collered shirt and pencil skirt and heels (WHY would you where these things in village?!) but she was nice and spoke English surprisingly well. At one point she said she didn't love her husband because he sh@t on her. WHAT?! I figured it was some poorly translated expression to say he was a jerk to her and went along with it. She kept bringint up over and over again how he sh@t on her throughout the day. Finally, she said something and from the context it suddenly clicked. "Wait," I said. "Are you saying he CHEATED on you?" "Yes, he sh@t on me," she responded. I explained that she was mispronouncing it and also explained what she was actually saying. Oh, Burkina...
Anyways, I guess that's it for now. I will try to update much sooner next time.
Peace out!!
Since there is no school kids are getting crazier and crazier. In fact, right at this very moment, a bunch of kids are just standing staring at me and my computer activities. Hooray. I will be very pleased next month when school starts.
I did do one little PC-esque thing. I made Neem Cream with my friend. Neem is one of many seemingly magical trees that Burkina has that has so many cool functions. The leaves of Neem trees can be used as a natural pesticide and when you boil them and add shea butter (shea trees are another super abundant tree here) and soap you get a natural, very inexpensive mosquito repellent! Which means reduced chances of getting malaria if you use it. So I helped my friend make it (read: gave her the recipe) and all of her neighbors love it. So now she is going to make more and try to sell it (income generating activity AND fighting malaria. BAM!)
Earlier this week was Ramadan. I celebrated the way people celebrate every holiday here: went to my friend's house and ate as much food as I could take. Which is not enough for them. They try to feed me SO MUCH and here is the thing I do not understand: why does village food taste like bitter dirt water? What is the secret ingredient that leads to it not just tasting blah but actively tasting bad??? I do not understand it. I just am thankful I can eat pretty much anything no matter the taste.
Speaking of which, last month was caterpillar month! Caterpillars were EVERYWHERE and guess what Burkinabe do with them. If you guessed eat them, you are correct. And since they are only prolific for one month all year they are quite a delicacy. So of course everyone wanted to give me some. Here's the thing, though. When they are fried well and you don't think about what you are eating, they are pretty good! I wouldn't eat them if people didn't give them to me and I certainly won't ask for them but if there is a bowl in front of me, I'll munch away and won't even be trying to calculate the minimun I have to eat so they will not force me to eat more.
And finally, a story about being villageoise (or I guess villagey in English) and also language mix ups. My friend's sister came to village to visit her one day. This sister lives in Ouaga and was very western by Burkina standards. She teaches English there so naturally everyone thought we should be friends. I felt silly in my fish pagne dress next to this lady in her collered shirt and pencil skirt and heels (WHY would you where these things in village?!) but she was nice and spoke English surprisingly well. At one point she said she didn't love her husband because he sh@t on her. WHAT?! I figured it was some poorly translated expression to say he was a jerk to her and went along with it. She kept bringint up over and over again how he sh@t on her throughout the day. Finally, she said something and from the context it suddenly clicked. "Wait," I said. "Are you saying he CHEATED on you?" "Yes, he sh@t on me," she responded. I explained that she was mispronouncing it and also explained what she was actually saying. Oh, Burkina...
Anyways, I guess that's it for now. I will try to update much sooner next time.
Peace out!!
Monday, May 30, 2011
Obviously. Clearly. Indubitably.
A few weeks ago, my friend asked me if my camera could take video. When I said that it could, he asked if I could film a wedding for him. I agreed (though what a villager with no electricity or computer or television will do with a wedding video, I have no idea).
Since people here are SO wonderful at sharing information with me (not!) I didn't find out that it was actually HIS wedding until the day before. I also didn't find out that it was in a different village until the day before. "Don't worry," they told me. "It's not far at all, only 3 km." Okay, 3 km, I can handle that. Except I think they really meant 6 or 7. In the 2PM heat of the day. In the bush (which means I'm biking through sand and bushes and ditches and such). I arrived exhausted but ready to film. I was led to a huge tree where a group had gathered-all the men on one end and the women on the other. Obviously I sat with the women, who all got a kick out of talking at me in Gouin and watching me cluelessly stare at them in response. People continued to chat as a group of men in the middle of the semi-circle talked amongst themselves. Phones were answered when they rang, children ran around, the bride and groom were nowhere to be seen and I figured that, like everything else here, things were going to start far later than planned. After a while, people got up and prayed (it was a Muslim wedding) and a woman instructed me to follow her.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"To eat," she responded. That's weird...eating before the wedding?
Another friend came up to me who knew I was going to be filming the wedding and said "Did you film it? You got all of it? I want to see what you got!"
"What?!" I cried. "What do you mean?!"
"The ceremony," he responded, with a tone that I expected to be followed up with a drawn out "DUH!"
"Um...well...people were running around and talking and there was no bride or groom or anything and I didn't know it even happened!" I blurted out.
He just stared at me for a minute.
"The guy gave the mother of the bride a pagne and then someone gave 500CFA. Then the dad got 1000CFA and then they..." he continued on about this convoluted ceremony that apparently took place as if to say "Really, Lindsy. How could you be so daft as to NOT realize that the ceremony was taking place right in front of your face?!"
Silly me.
Since people here are SO wonderful at sharing information with me (not!) I didn't find out that it was actually HIS wedding until the day before. I also didn't find out that it was in a different village until the day before. "Don't worry," they told me. "It's not far at all, only 3 km." Okay, 3 km, I can handle that. Except I think they really meant 6 or 7. In the 2PM heat of the day. In the bush (which means I'm biking through sand and bushes and ditches and such). I arrived exhausted but ready to film. I was led to a huge tree where a group had gathered-all the men on one end and the women on the other. Obviously I sat with the women, who all got a kick out of talking at me in Gouin and watching me cluelessly stare at them in response. People continued to chat as a group of men in the middle of the semi-circle talked amongst themselves. Phones were answered when they rang, children ran around, the bride and groom were nowhere to be seen and I figured that, like everything else here, things were going to start far later than planned. After a while, people got up and prayed (it was a Muslim wedding) and a woman instructed me to follow her.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"To eat," she responded. That's weird...eating before the wedding?
Another friend came up to me who knew I was going to be filming the wedding and said "Did you film it? You got all of it? I want to see what you got!"
"What?!" I cried. "What do you mean?!"
"The ceremony," he responded, with a tone that I expected to be followed up with a drawn out "DUH!"
"Um...well...people were running around and talking and there was no bride or groom or anything and I didn't know it even happened!" I blurted out.
He just stared at me for a minute.
"The guy gave the mother of the bride a pagne and then someone gave 500CFA. Then the dad got 1000CFA and then they..." he continued on about this convoluted ceremony that apparently took place as if to say "Really, Lindsy. How could you be so daft as to NOT realize that the ceremony was taking place right in front of your face?!"
Silly me.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Ça fait deux jours!
That is African French colloquial for “It’s been a while!” (though I don’t know why, since it literally means “That makes 2 days”)
Let’s see…what’s new? I just had an in-service training, which did have some boring moments but was overall surprisingly interesting. I am excited to go back and use what I learned (and the new “supplies” I got…including LOTS of condoms and model reproductive organs on which to use them!)
And, of course, it is always fun to see other volunteers. I am pretty sure a secret requirement to join the Peace Corps is that you have to be a RIDICULOUS dancer. I fit right in…
We are actually just ridiculous in general. We speak in Franglais all the time (with a little local lang thrown in) and often don’t even know/remember how to say things in English or sometimes we don’t even know how to say things in French. (Like Jii Tige. It means the person who guards/runs/takes money at the public water pump. But tige really has no direct translation. It can mean manager or caretaker or person-in-charge-of or…I don’t know. I can’t explain it. You just need to know it in context) I’m sure we confuse locals all the time. We are CLEARLY foreigners (nasaras or tubabus, depending on what region we’re in) but we speak local languages and we act like we have never seen a real building or electricity or televisions or toilets or eaten anything besides rice and sauce in our lives. VERY villagois (villager) but VERY foreign at the same time. Confusing.
Because no one can understand us (most of the time…) we talk as loud as we want about pretty inappropriate things in public. Anything from how annoying the person right next to us is to bodily functions of any kind (when your bodily functions are this weird, you can’t help but share them with others who can relate) are frequent topics of conversations and on the rare occasion someone near us speaks English BigBig (here, thanks to the direct translation from local languages to French and then to the little bit of English they learn, people say they speak English “small-small”) we are rather embarrassed. Also, we all are concerned about what will happen when we are back in the U.S. and basically everyone speaks English and knows what we are saying…I’ll know my true friends when I return because they’ll be the ones who will go out in public with me.
Let’s see…what’s new? I just had an in-service training, which did have some boring moments but was overall surprisingly interesting. I am excited to go back and use what I learned (and the new “supplies” I got…including LOTS of condoms and model reproductive organs on which to use them!)
And, of course, it is always fun to see other volunteers. I am pretty sure a secret requirement to join the Peace Corps is that you have to be a RIDICULOUS dancer. I fit right in…
We are actually just ridiculous in general. We speak in Franglais all the time (with a little local lang thrown in) and often don’t even know/remember how to say things in English or sometimes we don’t even know how to say things in French. (Like Jii Tige. It means the person who guards/runs/takes money at the public water pump. But tige really has no direct translation. It can mean manager or caretaker or person-in-charge-of or…I don’t know. I can’t explain it. You just need to know it in context) I’m sure we confuse locals all the time. We are CLEARLY foreigners (nasaras or tubabus, depending on what region we’re in) but we speak local languages and we act like we have never seen a real building or electricity or televisions or toilets or eaten anything besides rice and sauce in our lives. VERY villagois (villager) but VERY foreign at the same time. Confusing.
Because no one can understand us (most of the time…) we talk as loud as we want about pretty inappropriate things in public. Anything from how annoying the person right next to us is to bodily functions of any kind (when your bodily functions are this weird, you can’t help but share them with others who can relate) are frequent topics of conversations and on the rare occasion someone near us speaks English BigBig (here, thanks to the direct translation from local languages to French and then to the little bit of English they learn, people say they speak English “small-small”) we are rather embarrassed. Also, we all are concerned about what will happen when we are back in the U.S. and basically everyone speaks English and knows what we are saying…I’ll know my true friends when I return because they’ll be the ones who will go out in public with me.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
You might be a PCV in Burkina if...
-you find yourself saying "It's only 90 degrees" and you aren't being sarcastic
-you save Kraft Mac&Cheese for special occasions
-it only takes you a couple weeks to read the unabridged edition of War and Peace
-you think places with toilets are fancy
-you are a local computer genius due to your ability to create an email account
-you share your house with lizards, spiders, bats, mice, or scorpions (or some combination of these things)
-your favorite "mixed drink" comes in Crystal Light packets
-you've graduated college but are receiving an allowance instead of a salary
-instead of mastering French and a local language in addition to English, you actually can't speak any language properly anymore
-you epitomize the phrase "necessity is the mother of invention"
-you regularly receive and send packages via the bus system
-your neighbors are convinced that all you have to do to get them into the U.S.A. is
make a call to the embassy (and can not be persuaded otherwise)
-you prefer to sleep outside in a tent instead of inside in your bed
-you aren't suprised by the things people carry on the back of their motos (matresses, chickens, pigs, cows...their wife who is in labor)
-it takes an hour to walk 1km because you have to stop every few feet and greet everyone you see
-you save Kraft Mac&Cheese for special occasions
-it only takes you a couple weeks to read the unabridged edition of War and Peace
-you think places with toilets are fancy
-you are a local computer genius due to your ability to create an email account
-you share your house with lizards, spiders, bats, mice, or scorpions (or some combination of these things)
-your favorite "mixed drink" comes in Crystal Light packets
-you've graduated college but are receiving an allowance instead of a salary
-instead of mastering French and a local language in addition to English, you actually can't speak any language properly anymore
-you epitomize the phrase "necessity is the mother of invention"
-you regularly receive and send packages via the bus system
-your neighbors are convinced that all you have to do to get them into the U.S.A. is
make a call to the embassy (and can not be persuaded otherwise)
-you prefer to sleep outside in a tent instead of inside in your bed
-you aren't suprised by the things people carry on the back of their motos (matresses, chickens, pigs, cows...their wife who is in labor)
-it takes an hour to walk 1km because you have to stop every few feet and greet everyone you see
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